One of Marten´s all time favorites singers Jeanette Lindström visited Gothenburg with her band. We think she is number one in Sweden as a jazz vocalist. We are using one of the tracks from Jeanette Lindström’s and Steve Dobrogosz’s record Feathers from 2000 on the ‘burn in’ CD that comes with the manual of each pair of Marten speakers. Feathers is a Burt Bacharach songs album, with simply vocals and piano. It is a lot more mainstream than her quite recently released record (her 9th) that won a Swedish Grammy for best Jazz record in January. This record has a space theme and it is called ‘Attitude & Orbit Control’ and is not entirely a traditional jazz album.

The concert was quite interesting and followed the space theme in it’s mood. Jeanette brought a great band with electric bass guitar, electric guitar, drums and keyboards. The musicians played with maximum concentration and timing, mainly coming from Magnus Öström the drummer from former EST, Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Sadly there is no EST any longer since the pianist Esbjörn Svensson passed away in a diving accident 2008.

Magnus and Jeanette Lindström were leading her band (and the audience) with a firm hand. She is a lot more than just a singer – her voice is strong, crystal clear, very rich and full of timbre. And she quite often uses it as an instrument of wordless singing to great effect with the band. There was a splendid quality to the live sound, even though we didn’t have the best seats. Thanks to sound engineer Åke Linton, who is listed as one of the musicians in the band, we got a full bodied sound experience.

Thank you Jeanette and the band for a great concert – it sure helped us overcoming our winter blues when we are longing for the spring that still seems to be far away.

Cheers
Jörgen

Photo: Andrew Nicholas - www.thiscityismine.com

After a nice authentic NYC dinner at the classical institution Peter Luger Steakhouse in Brooklyn, we arrived quite late at the Terra Blues Club in Greenwich Village. Having eaten a good chunk of delicious meat we were in the best of moods. We got a table, ordered a few beers and then the music started. What a shock – we were totally blown away by this guitarist and his trio. Loud, long, powerful jamming tunes that sometimes went from one song and seamlessly changed over to another one. Suddenly a trumpetist arrived at the dark stage playing a solo – and this underlined the openness of the music.

We had seen this recommended in the TimeOut Magazine and took a bit of a chance as we had never heard of Michael Powers before. He has a lovely voice and plays fabulous solo guitar with a lot of rhythm and a free floating feeling – just great! Apparently he plays with his drummer and bass player twice a week at this blues bar in Bleeker Street. Powers is heavily influenced by Jimi Hendrix, but with his own unique thing within the given frames of the genre – guitar blues.

Another night we reserved a table at The Blue Note Café and saw a great act with Joe Sample (formerly The Jazz Crusaders) telling stories, recounting memories and playing music from his long career.

A very intimate and personal performance – trio jazz at a very high level, which we enjoyed a lot.

The same night we popped in to a place called The Groove Bar & Grill. A proper NY place with different live bands every night. The band called Li’nard (which is the name of the band leader to the right in picture) played a lot of covers but in their own R&B type way which was really cool. We had to sit at the last available table, right in front of the small stage and the band made fun of us for covering our (golden) ears – it was quite loud just in front of the stage with a full band performing – so we became part of the entertainment. It was a right laugh all the way as they were as good as entertainers as they were musicians and singers.

If you’re in NYC for a few nights we highly recommend all of these places:

Blue Note
Club Groove
Terra Blues Club
Peter Luger Steakhouse

The first photo in this post was taken by Brooklyn photographer/designer Andrew Nicholas. The rest of them were only taken with our mobile phones unfortunately, so sorry about the quality.

Cheers
Jörgen